22. Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Two
Phoenix
The hotel room is too quiet for a man who gets paid obscene amounts of money to make noise.
It’s late afternoon in a city I know only by the view from the window, the minibar’s quality, and the women camped outside the hotel, hoping to catch my eye with lipstick, tight dresses, and terrible fucking judgment.
There is no show tonight which should feel like a break. But it doesn’t.
Instead, it seems like someone locked me in a room with my own thoughts.
The guys are heading out later to an exclusive club Damon keeps calling “good optics,” because apparently being photographed beside billionaires and champagne bottles bigger than toddlers is part of being a rockstar now.
I’m not fucking going. They can enjoy the overpriced fuck parade without me.
Jax has texted me twice already trying to convince me.
Jax: You coming?
Jax: Don’t be a boring prick.
Damon tried one last time.
Damon: Label expects you to maintain a visible presence across select social environments.
Visible presence. Corporate has a beautiful way of making everything sound respectable. These people could call a cocaine binge a team-building exercise if they found a sponsor willing to fund it.
A month ago, I’d already be dressed. Half-cut before we even left the hotel.
By midnight, I’d probably have someone on my lap and another woman wondering if she was next.
Now, after nearly losing the one person who has ever truly mattered to me, every invitation is like someone asking me to step back into my old life.
And after watching Willow lying in that hospital bed, I think that life no longer fits me.
Instead, I’m sitting on the floor of my hotel suite, my back against the couch, my guitar across my lap. A bottle of whiskey sits on the coffee table in front of me, and beside it, a blunt burns down in the ashtray.
I pluck at the strings without playing anything real.
Half a melody. A chord progression that goes nowhere.
Two notes that almost become something before I kill them by overthinking.
Even though I’ve played this guitar for so long that my fingers know it intimately, the music still doesn’t sound right.
It has my sound, Willow’s absence, and no fucking spine.
I still have not heard from her.
Graham gave me another update two days ago after I called him again and tried not to sound like a man begging for scraps from the father of the girl he nearly broke.
He told me that she was doing well.
Doing well.
Two fucking words that almost made me throw my phone through the window because they were so useless. Was she sleeping? Was she writing? Did she still hate me? Did she say my name or had they already taught her how to cut it out of her mouth?
I reach for the bottle and take a drink. The whiskey burns all the way down, with the kind of warmth that used to pass for comfort before comfort took Willow’s name and a pair of brown eyes.
I grab the blunt, take a deep drag, and hold the smoke until my lungs start to protest.
Good. Fucking let them. Every organ I own has been getting very fucking opinionated since Willow walked into rehab and left me standing outside with nothing but a promise I didn’t know how to keep.
You don’t know how to stay.
Then I’ll fucking learn.
Easy thing to say when she is standing in front of me with tears she is too proud to let fall.
The harder thing to do when staying looks like sitting alone in another city, not touching women who are begging to be touched, not drowning in the space she left behind, and not blowing up the entire tour just because my chest feels hollow enough to echo.
The label is losing patience with me which would be tragic if I gave a single fuck.
Apparently, walking out of the green room early after every show has become a concern.
I am contractually obligated to stay, they tell me.
Smile for the cameras. Shake the right hands.
Sign whatever gets shoved in front of me.
Flirt with the right women. Keep the machine fed with my face, reputation, and the carefully manufactured illusion that Phoenix Stone is having the time of his fucking life.
Damon has sent me six messages regarding everything.
Then he called four times.
I answered on the fourth because I was starting to enjoy imagining his blood pressure readings.
“You can’t keep disappearing,” he said.
I took another drink. “You can disappear my cock down your throat if you need to feel involved.”
He hung up.
Still, I couldn’t bring myself to give a fuck.
I understand what they want.
Hell, I built the asshole they keep buying tickets for.
The crowd wants the bad boy. The frontman with the filthy mouth.
The women want the version of me that signs their tits, winks at their friends, and fucks them in a bathroom stall, and by the time he tucks his cock back into his jeans, he has already forgotten their names before the door even swings shut.
I spent years making sure that guy never disappointed.
Thought enough willing women could drown out anything.
Loneliness. Pressure. Fear. Turns out they only made the room louder.
Because no pair of tits, no pretty mouth, and no easy fuck has ever come close to the one who understood the distinction between who I am and the bullshit I hid behind it.
I set the blunt back in the ashtray and drag my fingers across the strings once more.
The same four chords.
They sound better this time or maybe I’m drunk enough to stop arguing with them. I hum under my breath, chasing a line that doesn’t sound like shit.
My fingers pause on the strings as my phone rings.
Unknown number.
I glare at my phone vibrating on the coffee table, already annoyed enough to blame the caller on the other end for interrupting the four chords that were finally starting to sound less shit.
Probably another label executive calling to remind me I’m not playing the game. As if I have ever played anything I didn’t intend to win.
The phone keeps ringing.
I pluck one string, then another, pretending the noise is not scraping across my last nerve.
It still rings.
Persistent little fucker.
I consider answering just to tell whoever it is to choke on their own necktie. I consider throwing the phone against the wall.
Instead, I snatch it off the table, swipe my thumb across the screen, and put it to my ear.
“What the fuck do you want?”
Silence.
My grip tightens around the phone.
Come on, asshole. Say whatever corporate little threat crawled up your throat so I can shove it back down there and get back to ruining my liver in peace.
Then Willow’s voice comes through. “Phoenix.”
Everything in me stops. Her voice hits me square in the chest, and my eyes close on instinct, as if shutting out the room could help me keep her voice inside.
Willow. My Willow. Not mine. I know that. I’m fucking aware of it. But the thought still comes anyway, stubborn as every other part of me that never learned when to let her go.
“Wills.”
My voice comes out rough, scraped down to something ugly. I clear my throat because apparently hearing her say my name has turned me into a man who cannot even operate his own fucking mouth.
“Fuck. I didn’t know it was you.”
“I gathered that.”
I lean forward and set the guitar aside carefully because my hands don’t feel steady enough to hold anything with strings and history right now.
“How are you?”
“I’m okay,” she says. “Not amazing. Not magically healed.” A pause. “But, I think I’m getting there.”
I press the heel of my hand against my eye, trying to hold myself together with one palm and a bad attitude. “Yeah?”
“Yeah.”
I want to ask her everything. If she’s been sleeping, eating, if she still wakes up scared. Does she think about me? If she still writes my name in the parts of herself she doesn’t say out loud.
“It’s hard,” she says after a moment. “Some days, I hate it. Some days, I hate that it helps.” Another pause. “How’s the tour?”
I glance around the suite. Whiskey. Blunt. Guitar. And too much money and not enough fucking air.
“It’s okay,” I say. “It’s not the same without you.”
“Are the shows going well?”
“The crowds are loud. Cruz is still trying to fuck his way through every city. Jax keeps pretending he isn’t doing the same thing. Jett is one bad night away from killing us all in our sleep.”
A soft laugh comes through the phone and the sound lands somewhere under my ribs. I would ask for another one if it wouldn’t embarrass me right now.
Her silence shifts.
I drag my thumb along the edge of the phone. “I keep looking over at the side of the stage, expecting you to be there looking pissed because I changed a line you already fixed.”
“I was usually pissed.”
“You usually deserved to be.”
“I’m shocked you noticed.”
“I notice more than you think, Wills.” The words leave before I can decide whether they are too honest, so I cover them with the only thing I have ever trusted. “Usually about six months too fucking late, but still.”
She goes quiet again.
“How are you really doing?” I ask.
“I told you. I’m getting there.”
“That is rehab-approved bullshit.”
“Phoenix.”
“I called your dad.”
That gets her attention. “You called Dad?”
“Yeah. Apparently, I enjoy being spoken to as if I were something he found stuck to his shoe.”
“What did he say?”
“That you’re eating. Resting. Attending the sessions.” I swallow. “Writing again.”
“He told you that?”
“He made me suffer first, but yeah, he told me that.”
A recorded voice cuts in before she can answer. “You have two minutes remaining.”
I sit up straighter. “What the fuck was that?”
“Phone time,” Willow says. “This is my first call I’ve been allowed to make.”
Her first call and she fucking called me. The thought hits so hard that I forget how to breathe for a second. Out of everyone she could have chosen, after everything I did, my name was still the one she called.
Her silence shifts. I’m familiar with that change. I’m more familiar with Willow’s reserved nature better than I know myself. There is a nervous edge to it now, like she is holding something back.