Chapter Four #2
Dred lifted his favorite Fender Stratocaster off the rack. The black and white Eric Clapton Signature model would play the perfect kind of tones he was in the mood for. “You guys making good progress?”
He sat down on his usual stool, placing the notebook on the small table next to it.
“Yeah.” Elliott jumped in. “What about you? Did you make good progress?”
Lennon sounded the classic bah-dum-dum on the drums.
Dred rolled his eyes as Elliott laughed. “Pix is coming to visit in a week or so.”
“No shit. That’s . . . unusual,” Jordan said.
“Yeah, it is,” Dred replied.
He wondered if he was being unfair to Pixie.
The more time he spent with her, the more he found to like.
So naturally caring, and surprisingly funny.
But the timing was off. Hell, the timing might never be right.
He had no intention of taking his foot off the career gas until he was at least thirty-five.
At some point, he’d move into the place he owned, an incredible Rosedale home that looked over the ravine.
Not until Jordan could deal, naturally. And Pixie lived in Miami, the most impractical place for someone like him who split his time between L.A.
and Toronto. Oh, and someone who also filmed a reality TV show eight weeks a year.
And toured. What the fuck am I thinking?
He wondered if he should call her and bail on their plans, give her some reason about last-minute gigs. Given the logistical nightmare that surrounded them, it might be better to call it quits before he was even more into her. The idea eviscerated his insides.
“You want to talk about it?” Nikan asked.
Dred shook his head. “What the fuck is this, therapy?”
“Well, if that’s a no, maybe we should show you what we’ve been working on today.” Nikan hoisted his guitar back over his shoulder.
On Lennon’s count, the guitars came in. The sound was dense, the notes tight. The fuzzy distortion of Jordan’s base an anchor to Nikan’s aggressive slides.
It was different from their usual style, arguably heading toward heavy rock instead of true metal.
He liked it. A lot. But he wondered what the record label would think.
Not that he’d change anything about the sound his brothers had created.
Fuck that. They’d always agreed the music would come first, the deal second. They’d need Sam to sell it though.
Lyrics started to filter through his head, and he mumbled along to the chorus. He’d been waiting for the right music to go with some lyrics he’d been holding onto for years. He grabbed his notebook. Every time he got a new notebook, he transcribed those lyrics to the front.
Reading them, he was taken back to the night his mom had overdosed in front of him.
He still didn’t get how a woman smart enough to name him after a Tolkien prince was so fucking stupid she OD’d on heroin.
Without access to a phone, he’d run out to the street and yelled for help.
Six hours later, he’d been taken to his first emergency care foster home.
The ideas from the notebook started to fall into place like lyrical Tetris.
Feelings from back then wrapped around him, squeezing him like a vise.
He felt suffocated. Choked. Cold. His hands shook at the idea of putting something so deeply personal out there.
Jordan would understand, having gone through the same process when he gave them the lyrics for “Dog Boy.” It was simply one more thing to survive.
This was why he needed to focus on his career.
He could never go back to that place where there wasn’t enough food or a safe place to sleep.
Where he was taken away from his mom, only for her to carry on as if nothing had happened when he was returned to her.
She had never seemed overly happy to have him back.
Numerous were the nights he’d lain in the spare room of a stranger’s home, wondering if they would hurt him if he fell asleep, or if he’d ever see his mom again.
He glanced at the lyrics, cursing them because they were the reason he couldn’t allow Pixie to distract him from his path, no matter how desperately he wanted her to.
* * *
“What about this?”
Pixie finished blowing her nose and looked over to the brightly colored silk Lia held up to the window.
The color changed from a warm red to a vibrant orange in the light.
It was beautiful, but not quite what she was looking for.
This fabric store ticked all of the boxes on her thrifty shopper checklist. Great selection and reasonable prices, especially on smaller pieces from the end of rolls, which was great because she rarely needed large pieces of fabric.
“It’s beautiful, but it’s the wrong color for my Graphium weiskei.” Her voice still sounded hoarse, but she didn’t have time to sit in bed another day.
Pixie touched an almost black silk that shone an iridescent blue. Perfect if she ever got another request for a beetle.
“Your what?” Lia placed the fabric roll back on the table.
“A butterfly collector for his niece. I looked it up. The common name is purple spotted swallowtail, but he gets pissed off if I call it that. It’s black, pinky-purple, and a weird lime green that might be yellow. It’s hard to tell on my phone.”
“You know some very strange facts, Pix.” Lia wandered off to the vintage cloth section.
Pixie rummaged in a bin containing discounted fabric and found a piece of matte-finish silk that had what looked like lilac splats of paint on it.
Perfect for what she needed. She added it to her basket.
Maybe she’d bring in the strange green color as part of the underskirt with the black tulle she intended to purchase from the next floor down.
Taking the stairs took its toll, leaving Pixie slightly breathless.
Damn this cough. When she’d measured and had a store employee cut the tulle, Pixie wandered over to the thread section.
Making her selections, she wondered how Dred was doing. Was he feeling better than she was?
She opened her phone and reread the message he’d sent her yesterday.
Two more days til you feel better. Seven more til I do ;-)
Still no idea of how to reply, Pixie dropped the phone back into her purse.
Why had she agreed to go to Toronto? It was so out of character, but when he’d asked her, the idea of him leaving and her not seeing him again for an indeterminable period of time hurt.
Not the drop-down-on-your-knees-and-weep kind of hurt, but a low and steady longing beneath her ribs.
Words of agreement poured out of her mouth before she had a chance to second-guess them.
The surprised look on his face when she asked when she should go was the best part of it.
Gone was the rough demeanor of the rock star, replaced by a youthful grin. That was the man she had feelings for.
Pixie pulled a spool of black cotton thread and added it to her basket, and noting they had a three-for-the-price-of-two sale, added a navy blue and a white spool too.
“Look what I found.” Lia dropped the leopard-print chiffon into her hand. “You could totally make something cute out of this.”
The sight of it sickened her. It was too close to the leopard-print scarf her stepfather would leave on the coat hook in the trailer to taunt her. He’d wait until her mom was passed out, sleeping off whatever high he’d provided, then he would pull it down and tie it around Pixie’s wrists.
For the briefest moment she was fourteen again, sitting where he’d put her on the silver kitchen stool with the torn red vinyl cushion. She’d struggled at first, shouted for her mom. He’d walked casually to the sofa and put his hands round her mom’s neck.
“You want me to squeeze, or are you going to shut the fuck up?”
She’d quieted immediately, sitting still like a good girl. He’d walked around the stool and used the scarf to tie her hands behind her back.
Pixie shook off the memory and tried to focus on the heavy weight of the basket in her hands, Lia’s distracted chattering, the colorful spools of cotton.
But nothing seemed to pull her back from the whirlpool of memories that bombarded her.
Like how badly she’d needed to pee, and how uncomfortable the sensation of snot and tears running down her face had been.
She’d felt an odd sense of relief when Arnie had headed to the bathroom and returned with toilet paper.
He’d gently cleaned up her face and walked to the kitchen to dispose of the tissue.
Even now it struck her as odd to worry about such a small piece of garbage when four days of dishes had been piled up next to the sink, flies buzzing around them in the stifling Florida heat.
Pixie looked back down at the fabric.
“Pix . . .” Lia walked toward her, the floor in the old store creaking underfoot, the sound reminiscent of the trailer when he would walk toward her.
Her stomach flipped, as ghostly fingers from the past stroked along her jaw line, and she recalled shouting to her mom, still unconscious. Wake up. Please, Mommy, wake up.
But she hadn’t. Not when she screamed, and not when his clammy fingers trailed to the top of the button-down sundress her mom had saved her tips in the diner for.
“Let’s see what you’ve been hiding under here.”
“You okay, Pix?” Lia’s voice brought her back to the present.
Pixie put the fabric down on the cutting table. “Sorry, still feel a little sick,” she said, coughing at the end for effect.
They checked out, then stopped at the grocery store on the way home, Lia insistent on cooking dinner for them both, which meant picking up a precooked chicken and readymade side salads.
Doing something so normal chased away the chill of seeing the fabric.
And it was impossible to stay down around Lia.
“Remember how the oven had never been used when I moved in?” Pixie asked Lia while they were in line to pay for the groceries.
Lia chuckled. “I used it to store my bananas. In my very first apartment, before Grannie helped me out with the condo, I kept my sweaters in my oven through the summer. Extra storage.”
They took a step closer to the checkout counter. Pixie glanced at the display, trying to find her favorite interior design magazine. Her eyes moved over the trash mags. Who read that shit? There was no way Elvis was alive and living in Ohio. The next headline stood out.
DRED ZANDER’S MIAMI VICE
Grainy as the photo was, it was still clear that Dred was grabbing a woman’s ass, pulling her tight against him in a kiss guaranteed to drive any woman wild.
Pixie’s hand shook as she opened the magazine.
It is alleged that the woman is an associate of Zander’s fellow reality show judge, Trent Andrews.
She wasn’t exactly hiding from her past. Not like Harper had.
This time she had been the assailant, not the victim, no matter how many times her sponsor told her she wasn’t.
But regardless of which title she went with, the facts remained the same.
She’d killed a man. The thought made her head spin, as she read more of the article.
The bright grocery store lights compounded the headache that was brewing.
Reconnecting with anybody from her past was a bad idea, yet the article gave away enough information to make that possible.
Her stepdad was equally at fault for the events that night and hopefully the totally fucked-up way it all went down would stop him ever going to the police.
She just didn’t want to ever have to deal with him again.
As Pixie glanced through the article one more time, her heart flipped. It didn’t reveal her name, but that meant nothing because as blurry as the photographs were, it was crystal clear that the purple-haired woman Dred Zander was taking on the ride of her life was her.