14. Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fourteen
Phoenix
The machine keeps moving without her and I fucking hate it.
It’s been two months without Willow and nothing has had the decency to break.
The label still wants its shiny little victory lap because the album is finished.
The tour waits with its mouth open, ready to drag us across the world so strangers can scream my name as if I were still the same man I was before all this shit happened.
Tomorrow is the local launch performance. The kick off of the world tour. One expensive, polished show in this city before the machine takes us everywhere except the one place I want to go.
Back to her. To Willow.
Back before she looked at me and saw the truth I had spent years dressing up in leather, fame, and a dirty smile. A man with enough ego to destroy the best thing in his life before he had the balls to admit that’s what she was.
I sometimes hear the guys talking about her when they think I’m not listening. How they miss her and how different everything is now without her. How the new songs don’t land the same now that Willow isn’t there to make sure they have a pulse.
I never say a damn thing because I can’t. Every time her name hits the room it hurts way too fucking much and I have no right to act wounded over my best friend, who walked away because I gave her every reason to.
At first, I thought she would calm down. I know that makes me sound like an asshole, but Willow and I have fought before. Years of her telling me I was full of shit while I pretended not to love that she was the only person brave enough to say it.
But this was not one of our little fights or her getting pissed at me for changing a lyric. Nor is it me pushing too hard or both of us pretending the thing between us had no teeth.
This time, we fucked. I touched her like she was mine, then treated her like shit afterward.
What Willow and the guys are unaware of is that I had no fucking idea how to handle my feelings after we fucked.
Where was I supposed to go from there?
Back to being best friends, as if I had not touched her body and pressed my mouth against her skin. As if I could stand beside her in the studio and pretend I didn’t know how fucking hot she sounded when she came.
Was I supposed to hold her hand? Kiss her in front of the guys? Act casual even though every part of me knew there was nothing casual about what happened between us?
I didn’t know how to be that man, so I became the one I already knew how to be. The asshole.
But God, I fucking miss her. It’s as if she left and took the only part of me that knew how to breathe.
Today is sound check for tomorrow’s concert.
Taped Xs mark spots under my boots, showing me where to stand when the lights hit.
The mic stand is set at center stage. Jax’s kit sits on the stage riser behind me.
Cruz and Jett’s amps are live, and the monitors at my feet keep spitting my voice back at me as the front-of-house engineer asks for another line.
Water bottles line the side of the stage. Cables cut across the floor. Crew members move through the shadows with headsets and clipboards, checking levels, lighting cues, and the blackout between songs six and seven.
Everything has a place. Every sound has a level. Every second has been measured, yet no one can fill the empty space where Willow used to be.
After Willow left, Damon brought in writers to help complete the final tracks.
I wouldn’t call them fucking writers. The first batch was soulless.
I read the lyrics and felt nothing. No pull in my chest. No itch in my throat.
I wanted to set the pages on fire and tell Damon that replacing Willow with hollow words was just another way to prove that she had been the heart of this goddamn band all along.
Cruz skimmed some of the verses and tossed them onto the console.
“I’ve had more emotional connection fucking a woman who kept checking her phone the whole time,” he said.
Jett picked up a page, read half of it, and looked at Damon. “You’re seriously asking us to play this shit?”
Most of what we said was rejected. That is the part that still pisses me off. Deadlines do not care what we think. The album release date was locked in. The world tour was already waiting, so those weaker songs completed the album.
The ones we all fucking hated and now have to play.
“Again, from the pre-chorus,” Damon yells.
I want to tell him to go fuck himself because we have been here for hours, running the same transitions and cues.
Jax leans back behind the kit, sticks loose in his hands. “For fuck’s sake, it should be done by now.”
Damon shoots him a look. “Start with track ten.”
Track ten. One of the shittiest songs on the new album.
I stand where the tape tells me and sing when the cue demands it.
Cruz comes in on the wrong beat, his guitar lagging half a second behind Jax’s drums before he kills the chord with a sharp twist of his hand.
Damon throws both arms out. “Stop. Again, from the same place.”
“It will still be shit the second time around,” Cruz mutters under his breath, too low for the crew to hear, but close enough for us to catch.
By the time sound check ends, I’m ready to get fucking wasted and stop thinking about my hands around Damon’s throat.
Not because I want to kill him. I just want to apply enough pressure to see whether those bulging eyes he has been fixing on me all day are finally willing to commit to the performance and pop right out of his skull.
Damon stops me by the door. “Press tomorrow morning. Make sure you don’t go in there with that smart-ass attitude.”
I glance back at him. “Relax, Damon. I’ll bring the pretty face, the dead eyes, and just enough charm to make everyone forget you’ve been swinging your dick all day because someone handed you a headset.”
I leave before he can utter another word.
Outside, fans wait behind the barricade by the side entrance, and the second they see me, they scream my name.
That sound used to go straight into my blood. It used to make me feel ten feet tall and bulletproof. Now it hits the hollow place Willow left behind and echoes back as proof that a thousand people can want me, yet none of them are the one I need.
I sign two things. Smile for a photo. Let a woman tell me she loves me with tears in her eyes, as if love is still something I deserve after everything I have done.
I get into the car waiting for me and check my phone, bringing up Willow’s name before I can stop myself.
Maybe I could try again. It’s a stupid, pathetic, desperate little thought.
A few days after I went to her parents’ house, I tried calling her again. Then texting. Too many fucking times. I sat there, staring at all those messages that never went through.
I have gone to her apartment more times than I care to count.
Sometimes I stand across the street, hands in my pockets, watching her windows for proof she is home. A light. A shadow. One glimpse of her moving past the glass, so I can confirm she still exists outside my head.
I have thought about going back to her parents’ house, but Graham would never let me near her now.
That man used to let me sit at his kitchen table, eat his food, and call me kid in that rough voice of his, as if I belonged there more than I ever did in my own house. Now he would probably break my jaw before I made it past the front door.
Willow shutting me out hurts like fucking hell. It’s not something I can drink through, fuck through, sing through, or turn into a joke before it gets its hands around my throat.
This is quieter. It sits beneath my ribs and bleeds without permission.
I have cut back on partying since she left because the noise no longer does its job.
The drugs still blurred the edges, the booze still puts me on my ass, and the clubs still served up enough willing bodies to fuck, reminding me that I could get whatever I wanted whenever my ego needed feeding.
But the problem is that Willow stayed sharp through all of it.
Sometimes I still chase it anyway. A hand, a mouth, a pussy.
All warm, willing, and wrong. It should work.
It always fucking worked before. Sex was easy then.
A hit of ego. A distraction with skin dressed up as pleasure.
Proof I could still make someone beg without giving them one single piece of me.
Now my cock gets the job done, but all it proves is that my body can still do what it has always done, even while the rest of me is somewhere else entirely.
None of them are Willow, nor do they come close to touching the silence she left behind. Nothing ever fucking does.
My apartment is all glass, money, and ego. Top floor because it has the biggest view and a private elevator that opens directly into the kind of cold, expensive air that used to make me believe I had finally achieved something.
Black leather. Designer furniture. A marble table that looks too pretty to touch.
Shelves of awards, bathed in soft light, lined up like proof that every egotistic thing I did to get here was worth it.
Floor-to-ceiling windows wrap around the city, all those lights spread out beneath me like the world once had the good sense to know where I belonged.
Back when I bought this place, I thought it meant I had it all. Now it only gives the silence more room to echo.
I drop my keys into a bowl that costs more than my first microphone and listen as the sound dissolves into a home that has never once felt like one.
My phone buzzes and for half a second, the stupid, desperate part of me awakens.
Willow.
My pulse kicks hard enough before I reach for it and see the name. Then the hope drops so fast it leaves scratches on its way down.
Mom.
Mara Stone only calls when she wants something or when she needs to feel as if she has checked the motherhood box for the week.
She has never been a mother in any way that mattered. Not to the boy I was when boys still needed their moms. Not when I came home bruised, hungry, pissed off, or too quiet for a kid who already knew silence was safer than asking for anything.
Now she calls because my name brings in money. And because some stupid part of me still answers.
“Hey.”
“Phoenix. Are you busy?”
“What do you need, Mom?”
A pause. “I was just calling to talk to my son.”
“Sure.”
“I saw something online about a tour” Her voice lifts, growing warmer now that she is close to the part she actually cares about. “You must be making good money from all that.”
There it is. Not how are you holding up or that you sound like shit. Just money. The real reason for her call.
I walk to the bar, already reaching for a glass because that is the only way I can get through a phone call with the woman who remembers she has a son whenever my bank account looks useful.
“Nice to hear from you too.”
“Don’t use that tone on me.”
“What tone?”
“The one that makes me feel bad for asking.”
“Then don’t ask.”
She sighs.
In the background, I can hear the television and my father saying something too low to make out. Ray Stone, present enough to need money, absent enough to let her do the asking.
“Things are tight,” she says.
Of course they are. Things have been tight my whole fucking life, and now I’m the one with the bank account big enough to make her remember she gave birth to me.
“How much?” I ask.
“I hate when you say it that way.”
“That’s the only reason you called.”
Her silence lingers just enough to make me seem like the bastard. She’s always been good at that. My mother can put guilt in a room without raising her voice, then stand there looking wounded until I hand her whatever she came for.
“Five thousand,” she says softly.
I laugh. “Of course.”
“Phoenix.”
“I’ll send it.”
“You don’t have to be cruel.”
“I said I’ll send it.”
“I just wanted to talk to you.”
“No,” I say, downing the whisky. “You wanted money. It’s fine. At least be honest about it.”
“We raised you.”
There it is. The little reminder. As if love were ever free in that house. As if every shitty dinner, every slammed door, every night I lay awake listening to them fight, became a debt the second my voice started making some money.
I pour more whisky into the glass because some wounds need something to burn them.
“I don’t know why I call when you’re in these moods,” she says.
“I’ll transfer it tonight.”
I hate how quickly I cave. Hate that one sentence from her can still reach the boy who used to wait around for her to love him.
Her voice warms instantly. “Thank you. You’ve always been a good boy, Phoenix. Good night.”
Before I can say anything more, she disconnects the call.
One drink becomes two. Two becomes fuck it.
I lean forward, grab the blunt off the marble table, and flick the lighter until the end catches. Smoke fills my lungs and I hold it there because apparently breathing only works when I’m choking on something.
The whisky burns. The weed hits. Neither of them do enough.
So I chase both harder.
Another pull from the blunt. Another mouthful of whisky. I let my head fall back against the couch and stare at the city glittering outside the windows.
I don’t want to think. In fact, I don’t want to feel one more goddamn thing sitting inside my chest with Willow’s name on it.
So I drink and smoke until my body gets heavy and useless. And when that still doesn’t shut me up inside my own head, I do what I do best. I ruin myself a little more.