Chapter 4
Chapter Four
ARLO
Twenty-three years old – March
It was official. I had a crush on my bodyguard.
Honestly, could I have been any more stereotypical? I’d taken the traditional ‘gay kid has a crush on straight boy’ and levelled up to ‘gay rock star has crush on straight bodyguard.’
It was so predictable it was almost comical.
Calling it a crush was underselling it. Mild obsession bordering on the creepy would probably be more accurate. Five years of living with him at my side meant I could never escape him.
It was all Jack’s fault. He’d shown up that Christmas Day, shitty petrol station pasties and a few packs of sour Haribo in a carrier bag, and everything had gone downhill from there.
You know what happens when you’re starved of attention for your entire childhood, and then someone attractive shows you a drop of kindness?
This. This is what happens.
A fucking obsession that has taken over my entire life.
I couldn’t even hook up anymore. They were all too short. Too smiley. Too blond. Too chatty. I found a thousand reasons to never go home with someone, but they all boiled down to the same one.
They weren’t Jack.
Fortunately, Jack was completely oblivious to my feelings. We’d grown closer over the past few years, striking up something of a friendship. Jack was still tight-lipped about anything personal, but I’d gleaned enough to feed my crush.
Like how he always opted for black coffee over tea. Savoury foods over sweet. His watch, always on his right wrist, was set four and a half hours ahead of London time.
I’d asked about it once.
“It’s the current time in Afghanistan.”
“Why Afghanistan?”
He stared at his watch for several seconds before answering. “So I don’t forget.”
Somehow I knew he wasn’t referring to the time. There was something else he wanted to remember. I assumed he must’ve been in the forces, perhaps having seen action there. He never confirmed it though, not wanting to blur the lines any more than we already had.
I hated it. I wanted the lines blurred. Fuck, I wanted them erased.
It made sense—everything about him screamed military. His buzzed hair, his bearing, the way he constantly scouted every place we went for danger.
I mean, yes, you’d expect that from any bodyguard. But Jack took it to a whole new level. Nothing escaped his notice.
Including my moods.
I’d never understood why or how I could go from the top of the world to a dark depression, seemingly without reason, but I’d always been this way. Could have been my childhood, or an undiagnosed mental health condition.
Or maybe I was just broken.
My other bandmates just let me get on with it. Sure, they sometimes tried to reach me through the darkness, but they never made it through.
No one could.
Except Jack.
He seemed to spot when I was having a bad day before I even realised it myself. He never drew attention to it, but he’d do little things that clued me in. Like dragging me for a brisk walk around the park, or slipping me a can of Tizer if we were around other people.
Little gestures that said he’d noticed. That he cared.
Sometimes it was enough to pull me back from the brink. Sometimes it wasn’t.
On those days, he stepped in too. Whether it was texting Kevin to say I had a migraine when in reality I couldn’t get out of bed, or following me as I stormed out of a meeting, unable to stomach any more bullshit.
Whatever I needed, Jack was there. Silent and non-judgemental, he’d become my rock.
And my obsession.
Not today though. Today was a day I was going to have to get through alone.
I knew before I opened my eyes that it was going to be a dark day. Not surprising, given what I had planned.
Visiting my parents.
I hadn’t been back to the estate since giving Jack the slip a few years ago. He hadn’t brought it up, and neither had I. If he thought it odd that I didn’t go back and visit my family, he didn’t remark on it.
He knew though. I wasn’t sure how, but Jack knew I didn’t have anyone outside the band.
The fact that he turned up on my doorstep every holiday and birthday kind of gave it away. They were the only times he’d lower his walls a little, letting me inside for a few hours.
We’d made our own traditions. Making cheesecakes out of Easter eggs.
Visiting the petrol station to see what bizarre concoctions we could put together for Christmas dinner.
Building effigies of people who’d pissed me off during the year and burning them on bonfire night.
Staying up until three a.m. watching scary movies on Halloween.
But my birthday was my favourite. I’d let slip one day that I’d never had fish and chips on the seafront. I’d also mentioned that I’d never been on a motorbike.
A week later, on my twentieth birthday, he’d sat next to me on Brighton Pier while we ate our food straight out of the wrapper. Jack’s motorbike, something I hadn’t even realised he owned, had been parked waiting for us.
We’d repeated it every birthday since, even when we were on tour in Japan. The only differences had been the constellations above us and that we had sushi instead of battered cod.
I tried to hold on to those memories as I slowly dressed for the day ahead. It was Sunday, Jack’s day off. Not that he took them religiously. If I had any plans, he tended to tag along instead.
It was completely unnecessary. Even as our success grew, we didn’t need twenty-four-hour surveillance. None of the others had their guards around as often as I did Jack.
I knew it was only because he was supposed to be keeping me out of trouble, but I didn’t care. I got to spend time with him, and that was all that mattered.
Yep. Totally healthy obsession here.
I hadn’t told him what I was doing today. I hadn’t told any of them, actually. They would have wanted to know why I was bothering to see them, maybe even insisted on coming with me. Silas especially. He knew what it was like, coming from a family like mine.
That would mean explaining what I’d been hiding from them all. The letters that hadn’t stopped coming. The increasingly threatening messages and phone calls. How I’d managed to hide it from Jack was a miracle. I think he thought I had a bloke I was keeping quiet about.
I wished that were the case.
I knew what they wanted even before I caved and opened any communication from them. It was the same thing they always wanted.
Money.
Usually I just paid them and they left me alone for a few months. The issue this time was they wanted fifty k.
In cash.
It wasn’t that I didn’t have that kind of money—I did. But getting it in cash? Without Jack noticing? Without my financial adviser seeing the withdrawal and questioning it?
Yeah, that wasn’t going to happen.
Look, I knew it shouldn’t matter if they found out. It was my money. I didn’t have to explain myself to anyone.
But, fuck. I couldn’t do it. I was so ashamed of how weak I was around them, of the control they still had over me. I didn’t want anyone else to know.
It was my burden. I’d always carried it alone, and I always would.
Over the past few weeks, I’d managed to withdraw money in dribs and drabs. It was still a lot, but the kind of amounts that could be explained away as me being irresponsible with money.
Which, to be fair, I was.
I’d got better over the years, but it was hard to rein it in sometimes. Did I need three Aston Martins?
No. But that hadn’t stopped me buying them.
Even with all my visits to the bank, I hadn’t managed to pull together enough. It was fifteen k short and they’d have to deal.
It wasn’t the threats to turn up on my doorstep that bothered me. Or even to send thugs to drag me from my bed and give me a hiding. It wasn’t like they could do anything to me they hadn’t done before.
It was the other threats that had me panicking. The ones where they threatened to go to the press, selling bullshit stories that would no doubt piss off my management and label.
That was the real concern. I didn’t give a shit about what they did to me, but I wasn’t having them hurt the others.
Well, there was a little concern for me.
Despite being on my best behaviour, Kevin kept insinuating that the label wasn’t happy with me.
Whenever I dared question anything, he’d be the first to tell me how fast the label would drop me from the band.
I was less reliable than the others and, thanks to my refusal to take on any sponsorship or advertising jobs, I brought in less money.
How could I? I could barely keep up with my responsibilities to the band. Adding anything else in would just fuel the fire that was my mental health.
Anyway, the whole thing was ridiculous given how big we now were. The coffers both at the label and in Kevin’s office had to be overflowing.
It wasn’t enough to calm the nagging worry in my mind that I might be dropped at a moment’s notice. What did I have without the band?
Nothing and no one, other than a deadbeat family who fucking hated me.
I couldn’t let that happen. Couldn’t let them threaten to ruin the only thing in my life I had going for me. Hopefully this money would be enough to make them disappear for a few months. Anything for a bit of fucking peace.
Pushing past all the designer labels in my wardrobe, I grabbed a pair of ripped jeans and my old Nirvana T-shirt.
A pair of battered Nike air max completed the look.
I stared at myself in the mirror, barely recognising the boy staring back.
I thought I’d left him behind. Thought I’d escaped him.
But he was always lurking in the shadows, waiting to come back to life.
Time to get this over with.
Zipping up the bag with the cash, I slung it over my shoulder and headed out to my car.
It was weird, driving my Aston without Jack in the passenger seat. I found myself glancing over every now and then, like I was expecting him to magically appear.
It remained stubbornly empty. A visual representation of just how fucking alone I was.
Not wanting to return to my hubcaps, or even wheels, missing, I parked over a mile away in a much nicer area.
Yanking my hood up over my head, I made my way back to my past. Before long, the nice detached houses with fancy cars on the drives turned into terraces with cars on blocks and boarded-up windows.
My heart sank with every step I took closer to the estate. I kept my head down, not making eye contact with anyone who passed. Not because I was famous—no, I’d always done this.
It was how you survived.
Don’t get me wrong, not all council estates were like mine. And not all people on my estate were bad. But those who weren’t survived the same way I did—by keeping their eyes down and pretending they didn’t see or hear anything.
I didn’t need to look where I was going, wending my way through the estate by muscle memory alone. I didn’t pause until I was in the stairwell that would take me up to their flat.
Not my home. It’d never been my home.
My fingers twitched reflexively on the strap of the bag. Was I really going to do this?
A callus caught on the fabric. A callus earned from years of drumming. Of finding a happiness I hadn’t dared dream of as a child.
That was enough to get my feet moving again.
I’d do anything to protect my peace, including dealing with my arsehole parents. One day maybe they’d stay firmly in the past, where they belonged.
Today, though, today wasn’t going to be that day.